Magento vs. Blueport
If you offered straightforward, low-cost goods, you would have a wide range of ecommerce platform choices. Instead, you’re a furniture retailer in need of a sophisticated ecommerce platform that will drive in-store and online sales, streamline your operations, and create a competitive omnichannel experience for your customers.
You’re already well-acquainted with your business logistics, complex product information, and unique marketing content needs. You've also seen the industry evolve, as shoppers expect to be able to browse online, in-store, or from both channels.
So, how do you overcome the challenges associated with bringing your retail furniture business online to provide the experience your customers expect?
Take a look at Magento vs. Blueport to see how a furniture-focused solution can help you reach your business goals.
Magento vs. Blueport for Furniture Ecommerce
The original Magento Community Edition is now known as Magento Open Source. The free, open-source version of Magento may be tempting, but it is primarily only suitable for very small businesses with simple products and likely not going to be sufficient for a furniture retailer.
Magento, also called Adobe Commerce, includes full developer access to the core code, making Magento’s ecommerce platform widely used for various types of enterprise businesses. It can be extensively customized and made to work for almost any application through custom coding, third party plugins, and other customizations.
This flexibility comes at a cost, however. As a Magento user, you must effectively build a custom website for complex industries like furniture. As a result, implementations can be slow and expensive, with most of your time and investment focused on getting things to work instead of designing a great shopping experience.
Additionally, once your site is launched, your website is likely customized to the point where it’s not a “generic” Magento site, meaning that responsibility for support, maintenance, upgrades, and feature additions falls to you.
At Blueport, our retail furniture focus translates into simple, efficient implementations, expert support, and continuous development of the features you need to support your brand, engage your shoppers, and drive online and in-store sales. Let’s take a look more specifically at the differences between Magento vs. Blueport.
Furniture Focus
Magento caters to larger and enterprise-level businesses across all industries. It is a good general platform that allows enterprise developers to customize the platform for their organization’s vertical.
Blueport was created specifically to solve the challenges of taking big ticket retail online. Because we know the retail furniture industry, our platform includes the features you need out of the box. Here are three examples:
PIM System for Furniture. With Blueport, you’ll be able to manage your extensive product catalog, complex attributes, and grouping requirements. Since Blueport integrates seamlessly with your furniture ERP, product pricing is generated directly from your existing system.
Sophisticated Promotions. Furniture retailers often run complex promotions that require rules about combinations and exclusions. Blueport not only handles that with ease, but it also uses geolocation technology to display promotions aligned with each website visitor’s local store experience.
Furniture Checkout. Blueport’s checkout system natively handles the many unique aspects of purchasing furniture — different shipping methods, upselling of protection plans, scheduling deliveries or in-store pickups, financing offers, and attributing sales to in-store staff that helped with an online transaction.
Customization
Magento is highly customizable, but it is complicated enough that many customers — especially retailers — need to hire a systems integrator for implementation, custom-coding of needed features, and integrating paid extensions. Magento customers also often maintain third-party contracts for ongoing support, additional custom development, and update management.
As a result, Magento is typically more costly than you may anticipate in terms of expense, effort, and time.
With Blueport, there’s no need to overcome those challenges. Our furniture ecommerce platform is designed for furniture retailers looking to build omnichannel experiences and add complex business rules to their websites.
We will design a fully customizable website tailored to your unique brand, shopping experience, and business needs. With native furniture-focused features and comprehensive third-party solutions integrated into the platform, you’ll be able to launch your website more quickly and efficiently to increase your revenue faster.
Integrations
Magento’s website states they “give IT a sophisticated platform for innovation.” Designed as a general platform that spans all verticals, the core product has limited functionality, requiring Magento integrations to fill in the gap.
Businesses often need to invest in additional add-ons, integrations, and extensions to access all the features they need. For example, Adobe Experience Cloud is needed for deep personalization, and integration is required for search engine tools. Magento extensions may come with additional costs, aren’t always well-documented, and your team will need to install and configure them.
Our Blueport furniture ecommerce platform was designed differently. We are a preferred partner for leading technology companies with a leading integration layer. Our team sets up best-in-class integrations as part of our full-service implementation process, letting you focus on other critical business needs.
Upgrades vs. Continuous Improvement
Magento maintains a schedule for upgrades; Adobe has announced they will have one core application patch and four security patch releases each year for 2023 and 2024.
Upgrade assistance is only available for managed services customers who have access to the company’s Customer Engineering team for assistance. For roadmap reviews, upgrade reviews, and release preparation, Magento users must purchase the Ultimate Support Plan.
These upgrades are focused on updates to Magento’s core application. They aren’t focused on a specific industry like furniture, and because furniture retailers often customize their Magento application extensively, they can be complicated to apply to a furniture website.
At Blueport, our roadmap is solely focused on improvements relevant to furniture retailers, developed in collaboration with leading furniture retailers. Together, we identify, design, test, and deploy enhancements, upgrades, and features for an effective omnichannel furniture ecommerce strategy. We use an agile process to produce the highest value for our users in the shortest possible time, releasing software updates as often as every two weeks.
Ease of Use
Magento isn't known for its usability. Its core code is available to developers but is often hard to understand and use. In fact, the Adobe platform is intended for developers with advanced technical knowledge, and regular users need some coding knowledge and understand technical terminology.
At Blueport, we enable developers and IT professionals to focus on critical business tasks only they can do. We empower business users to turn your website into a powerful marketing tool with powerful merchandising tools. Your team will find it easy to:
- Manage the website, catalog data, SKU relationships, and more
- Use intuitive tools for real-time marketing asset change
- Preview and schedule content and product landing pages
- Create custom landing pages based on auto-detection of the shopper’s location
- Create complex online promotions aligned with in-store efforts
- Build public or private coupons with applicability and exclusion rules
Customer Support
Magento support is primarily provided with a help center and knowledge base. As a Magento user, you can submit support tickets for standard outage management and standard support. For more robust support activities, prioritized service, maintenance and monitoring, and launch advisory, you must purchase Adobe’s Ultimate Support Plan.
Blueport has expert implementation specialists, QA professionals, IT operators, DevOps engineers, and support engineers who provide launch services and ensure your site is running optimally at all times with 24/7 performance and uptime monitoring. Our support team does much more than simply answer user concerns; they work proactively with users to identify and prioritize changes and enhancements.
Hear From Our Customers in Furniture Retail
Brooklyn Simmons
Senior Exploration Geoscientist
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted. the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted.
Guy Hawkins
Backend Engineer
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted. the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted.
Kathryn Murphy
Sales Development Lead
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted. the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted.
Magento for Furniture Ecommerce FAQs
Q1. What’s the difference between Magento and Blueport?
Magento is a general platform that can be applied across industries. It has a wide range of functionalities, features, and tools, but selecting and installing the right ones add to Magento’s complexity. Magento may not be suited for the average business user, although enterprise businesses with large IT departments may choose to install, configure, and maintain it.
Blueport was specifically designed for big ticket items like furniture. Even though the setup is easy with many native features and a leading integration layer, our expert implementation team handles that for you. The platform was also designed for business users. Intuitive interfaces let your team take over after implementation without missing a step.
Q2. Which platform has better security?
As expected, Magento security includes PCI DSS compliance. Adobe releases security patches four times yearly to include the most recent versions of its security measures; however, unless you have a managed services contract, you will be required to install the patches yourself.
With Blueport, we take the pressures of managing your security off your shoulders. Our expert team:
- Manages patches, vulnerabilities, firewall rules, cipher standards, penetration testing, DDoS protection, intrusion detection, and more
- Provides 24/7 performance and uptime monitoring to ensure your site is running optimally at all times.
Q3. How do I migrate from Magento to Blueport?
We make the migration easy for you and your team.
We’ll start by establishing connectivity with your ERP systems and assessing data sources. Then, we’ll begin to build a prototype of your new website based on our best-in-class furniture portal model.
Together, we’ll identify the features you’ll need to launch your new ecommerce website and create a plan to generate the data needed to power these options.
We then build your website, including a customized and branded look and feel, unique user experiences you may require, and incorporation of your specific business rules.
It’s a unique approach made possible by our purpose-built platform and deep retail furniture industry experience. The outcome is that most implementation efforts (and investment) are spent on designing the ideal omnichannel experience for your shoppers instead of explaining the industry to a generic ecommerce vendor or solving integration challenges.
The Verdict:
Magento vs. Blueport
An ecommerce solution will have lasting effects on your business, so you want to make the right decision the first time. When considering Magento vs. Blueport, it comes down to the question of industry and how you want to spend your money.
Retail furniture is a unique industry with big ticket products, complex attributes, and multiple grouping options. Blueport’s furniture ecommerce platform includes the native features you need for a powerful omnichannel presence. Our solution, configured and implemented by our experts with deep industry knowledge, eliminates the extra cost of making a general platform work for your business.
Instead, Blueport enables you to streamline your operations, drive revenue, and allocate that unneeded cash to other purposes.
Ready to see how Blueport can transform your business?
Contact us today.